Basic humanity of the arts world -- we hope -- transcends race

Steven Winn

Published 4:00 am, Wednesday, June 6, 2007

They were blips, bumps, stumbles in the daily flow of doing business in the arts. A jazz club issued a commemorative CD and got the roster of artists wrong. An opera company dismissed a singer on the grounds that she wasn't meeting expectations in her part. Things like that happen. Normally there's a press release, or sometimes not, and maybe a little ripple in the press. The people involved may feel slighted or self-justified or embarrassed, or perhaps some combination of the three, and everyone moves on.

But because race was involved, or might have been involved, or might have been seen to be involved, what happened at the Oakland jazz club Yoshi's and at the San Francisco Opera last week became bigger stories. And then it started. There were e-mails and phone calls, public statements and counter-statements. Perception became reality. Alternate realities piled up. Motives were turned inside out and scoured. Speculative scenarios bloomed. The clamor threatened to drown out the music that people loved and cared about and that presumably bought them all together in the first place.

At the risk of interpreting these now heavily interpreted stories merely by recounting them, here's what happened:

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Acting with what they later called unthinking haste (and what others ascribed to unthinking racism), Yoshi's released a 10th anniversary CD last month with no African American performers included. Some people noticed and began talking and e-mailing one another and discussing it on radio. Linked to another story, about the racial composition of the forthcoming Berkeley Downtown Jazz Festival bookings, the news made the front page of The Chronicle. Yoshi's issued an apology the next day and withdrew the CD, which they were selling only on their Web site, and vowed to issue a replacement.

At San Francisco Opera, three days before the opening of "Don Giovanni," soprano Hope Briggs was fired and replaced by Elza van den Heever in the role of Donna Anna. Instead of colluding with management on some face-saving euphemistic excuse, Briggs agreed to the company announcement, that she "was not ultimately suited for the role in this production." Briggs, who is African American, said she did not think race was a factor in her firing, saying instead that she had been given no advance warning that her work was substandard. That, in turn, raised the question of whether the company may have been reluctant to criticize a black singer during rehearsals.

Opera General Director David Gockley was obliged to react to phone calls and at least one published implication that race may have played a part in Briggs' fate. He defended what he called a "nobly color-blind" opera world of recent years.

We're living in a "post-racial" America, social critics have been saying for some time now. That's why a mixed race candidate like Barack Obama can mount a mainstream campaign for the White House. That's why neighborhoods in big cities and even some not-so-big ones have become dazzling prisms of racial and ethnic variation. It's why, in the movies and on television, in the theater and in museums in 2007, artists across the spectrum are represented in ways they weren't in the white-bread America of 1957, or for that matter 1977 or 1987.

Even Fox News' Bill O'Reilly seems to take the point, however grudgingly. Acknowledging the inevitability of immigration reform, the network's attack dog "reluctantly" voiced support for the proposed bill while noting that immigration "drastically alters the United States of America." With one-third of America already "minority" (a term of rapidly approaching obsolescence), four states, including California, now have populations that are less than 50 percent white. The drastic alteration O'Reilly foresees, in other words, is already a living, breathing reality.

Then Yoshi's bungles a song list on a CD or the San Francisco Opera fires an African American singer, and the culture wars of 20 and 30 years ago are promptly rejoined. It's an endlessly renewable rite in American life, it seems, an almost reflexive response to anything inflected by a question about race, whether it's a jazz CD, a night at the opera, an immigration bill or Don Imus insulting a college women's basketball team on the radio. We line up and start the accounting. Who said what or did what and on how many times and on what occasions? How many songs? How many singers? What's the racial or ethnic breakdown?

We demand specificity for questions that don't have specific answers. About half the musicians Yoshi's books into its Jack London Square nightclub are African American, its managers said. To some that proved the case that the club isn't racist. To others it only made the omission of black artists from the CD all the more glaring. To still others it proved nothing at all.

You could almost hear the sense of futility in Gockley's quote when he noted that his casting over the years demonstrates his record of color-blind choices. Once the issue of Briggs' race was invoked, an inevitable rubric of non-musical or extra-musical issues descended. It wasn't about the best cast for "Don Giovanni," or at least it wasn't only about that. It was about something else.

The more we talk about race, it sometimes seems, the less we understand its almost infinite manifestations and nuanced gradations. Harvard Law School Professor Randall Kennedy wrote an entire scholarly book, titled "N -- ," and concluded that the impact of that word depends entirely on context, on who uses the term and how and what they mean. That's about the same thing hip-hop artists say when critics allege racism (and sexism) in their lyrics. We hear what we hear, see what we see, in culturally determined and subconsciously embedded ways that are very hard if not impossible to transcend.

One insoluble fact about race, whether we live in a post-racial age or not, is that at some fundamental level we really can't talk about it at all. We all live in our own skin. Empathy, a real identification with different experience, is enormously difficult to achieve. And maybe, more so than with class or gender, we also remain strangers to ourselves about race, to how it shapes and forms us. We all live deep inside our own skin.

Numbers and quotas and other objectifiable measures are invaluable when it comes to job or housing discrimination, employment figures and voting rights. They measure real, quantifiable things. The arts, we believe, we hope, are different, a realm where we really can connect -- beyond race and class, beyond identity. We shouldn't have to count and keep score and pay attention in that way. But music and the other arts don't change or obliterate who we are. They show us the glimmer, the possibilities, the aspiration. That's why we keep listening -- to the music and maybe, if we're lucky, to each other as well.